Jack Coons: From Serrano to School Vouchers

Berkeley, Calif.--Some 20 years ago, as a young law professor at his
alma mater, Northwestern University, John E. Coons got a fateful call
from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission, the caller explained, was seeking someone to look
into the Chicago school system's compliance with Brown v. Board of
Education, and its first choice wasn't available.

"They'd heard I had a bunch of kids and needed the money," Mr. Coons
recalled recently. "They were right. I took it."

"So there I was, prowling around Chicago looking for $100
differences in expenditures between black schools and white schools.
Somebody said, 'If you think that's bad, you ought to look at New Trier
[in a well-to-do Chicago suburb]; they spend twice as much.' And I
started wondering what kind of system this was that allowed that to
happen. ... When you step back and look at it, it really is a crazy
system. If you tried to put it together now, nobody would tolerate
it."

From that accidental introduction, Mr. Coons has emerged during the
ensuing two decades as one of the nation's most influential
theoreticians on the subject of public policy toward elementary and
secondary education--and as something of a gadfly as well. Together
with some of his former students, he developed the theory of "fiscal
neutrality"--or equal revenue yield for equal tax effort, regardless of
a communi ty's property wealth--that has reshaped the way most states
finance public schools. He remains active in finance reform, having
testified recently in the third round of California's Serrano case.

'Family Choice' in Education

These days, however, his name is most often associated with the idea
of "family choice" in education through a regulated system of vouchers
or grants--a cause he has actively promoted in California for the past
several years, without succeeding in having it placed on the
ballot.

And Jack Coons, now on the faculty of Boalt Hall, the law school of
the University of California's flagship campus here, is at it again. As
they did with finance reform, Mr. Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, a
former student who is now a colleague at Boalt Hall ("the brains of the
mob," Mr. Coons calls him), are now eyeing the courts as an instrument
of change.

The idea, first suggested by a Japanese colleague on the Boalt Hall
faculty, is strikingly simple: Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of
1871 permits individuals to seek money damages as redress for
discrimination. Mr. Coons says minority-group students in
unconstitutionally segregated school systems could sue to obtain from
defendant school districts what would be spent on their education, then
apply the money toward tuition in a private school or a suburban
public-school district. Such a plan would, he says, give the victims of
discrimination a genuine chance at a better education, without the
divisiveness and unrest often resulting from court-ordered busing.

"What is it about judicial power that it can only force people and
not give them opportunities?" he says. "There are empty seats in those
[private and suburban] schools. For the same money that is now getting
nothing in a place like Detroit, those kids could have gotten
something."

The idea is still gestating; Mr. Coons and Mr. Sugarman are
soliciting the reactions of other scholars and lawyers. And most
im-portant, Mr. Coons said, is picking the right case to pursue such a
remedy. "I don't want it to fall into the hands of some nut who'll
screw it up," he says.

Corner on Educational Wisdom

Underlying both the general freedom-of-choice concept and the idea
of seeking vouchers as recompense for illegal segregation, Mr. Coons
says, are two central theses: that no one, particularly the
public-school bureaucracy, has a corner on educational wisdom, so the
choices of well-informed parents are most likely to be in the best
interests of children; and that low-income families are denied the
freedom of choice that is available to those who can afford to pay for
private schools or to choose where they live.

"The wealthy in this country can make that kind of choice. If you've
got the money, it's a perfectly respectable thing to move to Palo Alto
and go to a fancy school. These are in fact private schools financed
with public funds. ... [Choice is] what the rich have been busting
their tails to get. It only takes experts not to see it."

A genial Midwesterner who is almost as well known in academic
circles for his tenor singing voice as for his scholarship, Mr. Coons
reserves some of his harshest criticism for state education
bureaucracies.

"These ideas come partly out of my own values," says Mr. Coons.
"Based on my observation of the ways that education spoils itself by
excluding the family, I've come to the conclusion that the only way you
can get equity and quality is to give the consumer the power he has in
other areas."

Pointing out that parents are permitted to choose the best way to
provide nutrition and health services to their children, he concludes
that "public education is an aberration. It's very peculiar as an
institution in that it's so untrusting of the average person. ...
Actually, you could make a pretty good case for constraining parents
with regard to medicine. It's an easy model; we can distinguish between
dead and live people. But in education we have no model. We have all
sorts of opinions, and rightly so. There are lots of panaceas that have
been served up, and they're all in conflict. Beyond that, there is
conflict over the values in education. So in light of the conflict over
the means to achieve common values, and in light of the conflict over
the values themselves, there is no intellectual justification for
forcing people to go to certain kinds of schools."

Compatible With Equity Goals

Acknowledging that his stance on vouchers is tantamount to heresy
among "some of my liberal friends," he insists that it is compatible
with the equity goals of the finance-reform movement. "In the very
earliest piece we published in 1969," he says, "we pointed out that
fiscal neutrality was quite consistent with full state assumption,
district power equalization, or vouchers. It is not a mandate for any
particular centralized or decentralized model. We've always taken the
position that decentralized models of decisionmaking are vastly
superior to their opposite. Why anyone would suppose that fiscal
neutrality is inconsistent with a family system is beyond me. I can see
how you might not like it, if you don't trust the family, but
intellectually, you can't justify it."

Although he concedes that centralized state authority often
accompanied the finance reforms he was instrumental in pushing for, he
believes that needn't be the case. The present system, he says, cannot
be perfected, "because you'd still be imposing bureaucratic judgment,
and there's no empirical evidence that it brings about better
education, more integration, consensus, or any of the other things we
cherish." But he believes, he says, that the public system could be
greatly improved by bringing school governance "to the smallest
possible political unit above the family" and by providing more choices
within the system.

"I'd like to see Los Angeles broken up. Who has anything to say
about what's good in Los Angeles except the unions and the politicians?
Instead of having 1,000 school districts in California, we ought to
have 10,000. Only in small units can individuals have any effect on the
politics of the system. Of course, they would have to be
power-equalized [financially].

"But the problem with politics as the basis for running a school is
that there continue to be people who are simply losers: They are forced
into schools they do not like. I would feel better if the unit were
smaller so they don't get swamped."

He is cautious about lending his name to some of the many
organizations promoting various "family-choice" initiatives in
education.

For example, he opposes tuition tax credits such as those proposed
by the Reagan Administration and the unregulated voucher scheme
proposed by the economist Milton Friedman on the grounds that they
would be of little benefit to low-income families.

Safeguards for the Disadvantaged

Central to the Coons-Sugarman voucher proposal--and what sets it
apart from the Friedman model--are the safeguards it envisions for the
disadvantaged. The plan includes guarantees that private schools set
aside a certain percentage of spaces for minority, handicapped,
low-income, and underachieving students, and it provides for an
elaborate system of information and independent counseling for parents
whose own lack of education might hinder their ability to make
discerning choices for their children.

The work of the sociologist James S. Coleman and others, Mr. Coons
says, "suggests that the kids who are worst off do better in private
schools than their counterparts who are left in public schools. Nobody
says the private schools are doing worse, and they're doing it in many
cases with half the resources."

He retains the litigator's keen instinct for seizing opportunities.
When Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers,
wrote favorably about the concept of "literacy vouchers" enabling
failing students to switch from public to nonpublic schools, Mr. Coons
gleefully claimed the union leader as a convert.

"The very Establishment," the lawyer wrote in the December 1981
issue of The Kappan, "has now embraced the two central ideas of the
voucher movement: Choice is good for education and society; and the
poor are capable of exercising it."

Critics of vouchers, he says, treat the poor "like feckless,
ignorant boobs who are incapable of making intelligent choices in the
marketplace. The fact is that they've never been asked. They've been
treated as though they had no brains or discretion. I'm not as ready to
give up on ordinary people as some of the critics are."

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